


Completing the Mission

by Hopetohell



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Gore, Injury, Major Character Injury, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:46:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27059728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hopetohell/pseuds/Hopetohell
Summary: How the final fightshouldhave gone. Or: Walker wins because we like him best.
Kudos: 9





	Completing the Mission

You’ve been hurt before. You’ve been shot, stabbed, poisoned. You have a silvery half-moon on your back from a wrought-iron spike that kissed your kidney, and a little mouth-shaped scar over your iliac crest from a honeypot mission that went bad (or rather, very good and _then_ bad), but that’s all pain that’s compartmentalized, quantifiable. It’s bright stars of hurt that you could shove down inside yourself til the end of the mission, and if you couldn’t ignore it all then you could at least accept it. 

But this. 

You are on fire. You are on fire and it is everywhere all at once. You curl around yourself at the edge of the cliff, rocks digging sharply into your knees, and you are counting breaths, trying to steady yourself, trying to pull yourself up above the pain. 

_Think of clean, cool sheets. Think of painkillers fired directly into your blood, think of blessed empty sleep. But first, the mission. You have to, you have to, youhaveto_

And you are hurting but you aren’t stupid; you know about the failsafe, so you fumble the strap of the detonator and slide it over the cliff. At least the mission will be complete. At least. 

You’re shaking, the meat of your thighs trembling as you’re holding yourself upright, as you turn slowly, fighting back nausea and fear. The world is strange and flat and your binocular vision is gone, maybe forever. You’re breathing out as slowly as you can and you can hear the whine, the thread of a hurt too big for you to hold inside. 

_Just a little longer. The extraction team has your signal, you can do it, you can do it. Hold on._

And there’s Hunt, bleeding from the ears, running at you with a strange shambling gait that speaks of a broken leg he doesn’t know about yet. He’s small and going to seed and on a good day you could crush him into dust, but this isn’t a good day. 

So when you grapple at Hunt, when you try to pin his arms like you were taught, he slips your grasp and climbs up your back like a monkey; he’s pulling at your hair with one hand and the other. The other. 

Fuck. 

The fingers of his other hand are digging into the sticky ruined flesh of your face, into the wet red flames that lick along your jaw and if the pain before was unbearable, this is _unimaginable._ Little pieces of you come off on his fingers; little spatters of blood and tissue fluid fly into the wind and are blown back into your screaming mouth. He burrows his hand in deeper, the claws of his fingers stopping only when they hit bone. 

And somehow you get your hands up and back, you grab Hunt by the shoulders of his jacket and twist as you fall to roll him beneath you, to crack his ribs under the sheer weight of you. And on a good day that cracking sound would send pleasure singing through your blood, but today is not a good day. 

_But it could be worse._

Because you are weak and you are wounded, but so is he, and you are much, much bigger. Stronger, even consumed by this fiery pain. You’re breathing shallowly through your mouth but you are breathing, you are rising. You are dragging Hunt to the edge of the cliff by his heels as he’s trying to shake off the daze from the fall, and he is stubborn but he is done for. You can’t pick him up; you’re dizzy and the shakes are starting to overtake you, but on your knees you can put your shoulder to his side and roll him to the edge of the cliff. 

You can roll him over the edge, even, and as he’s screaming and cursing and plummeting to the valley floor you over correct and nearly fall yourself, but in the end you lie panting at the cliff edge, what’s left of your vision hazing and fading. But you can hear the droning thud of a helicopter approaching, and in the distance there’s a bright light and a roar like thunder.


End file.
